A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
The past few weeks have been a series of can-we-make-it-to-the-next-day? days. Days full of class-and-homework, my looming book deadline, and the last dregs of winter; weeks that all seem the same.
I sit on the edge of our bed talking to T, whose eyes are worn with sickness. We have food poisoning, and it's the first time we've both been sick, at the same time, since having N. I rake the carpet with my toes, listening to her shout No! over and over again, her tiny voice permeating through the walls and ringing in my ears. She should've been asleep a long time ago. This weekend has been hard. I am tired. But something in me feels new.
Somewhere between the hours of school and hours of work, between the food poisoning and the exhaustion, between the constant cleaning and meal-planning and piles of neglected laundry, I'd found the proof. I didn't even know I was looking for it, but here it was, hanging in the mundanity: proof of a life well-lived.
Even the most disappointing of experiences hold meaning. I try to remember that even though I'm not always successful. But when I stop rushing through them to get to the “good” part of life, the value is too great to miss. The good part is here––in the illness, the deadlines, and the round, giddy baby who watched an entire hour of Daniel Tiger while her mother lay, utterly exhausted, beside her.
The good part is here: I'm holding onto the proof.
TUESDAY
"But how does one keep an imagination fresh in a world that works double-time to suck it away? How does one keep an imagination firing off when we live in a nation that is constantly vacuuming it from them? And I think that the answer is, one must live a curious life. One must have stacks and stacks and stacks of books on the inside of their bodies. And those books don’t have to be the things that you’ve read. I mean, that’s good, too, but those books could be the conversations that you’ve had with your friends that are unlike the conversations you were having last week. It could be about this time taking the long way home and seeing what’s around you that you’ve never seen, because most of us, especially city folk, we stay in our little quadrants.
But what if you were to walk the other way? What if you were to explore the places around you? What if you were to speak to your neighbor and to figure out how to strike a conversation with a person you’ve never met? What if you were to try to walk into a situation, free of preconceived notion, just once? Once a day, just walk in and say, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, and let’s see. Let me give this person the benefit of the doubt — to be a human.” ––Jason Reynolds on Imagination and Fortitude (via On Being)
*For those with pre-teens, I recently listened to When I Was the Greatest and recommend it for many reasons, but especially for what it teaches about non-traditional friendships, families, and building inner confidence.
WEDNESDAY
I'm continuing my experiments in collage (see above for my latest). This process has brought forth several questions within me: Whose voice is lost when an existing work is combined with something new? Does an artist have the right to illustrate someone else's words? What does it mean to be inspired?
For now, I'm enjoying the exercise collage brings. It attracts me to a wider range of ephemera, opens up my compositions, encourages me to combine textures, and forces me to relax. It's also been a really surprising exercise in letting go: I cut and paste without really knowing why or how, propelled further by intuition than my thinking brain, and in the end, I find that I'm somewhere unexpected––and that it is good.
THURSDAY
As far as kisses go, N's way of giving them has been to smush her cheek next to yours. This is all she's ever done in her 17 months of life. Tonight, after dinner and bath time, she climbed into T's lap and gave him her first real kiss: her mouth against his cheek, followed by a great big cozy hug. The first kiss she's ever given anyone! I watched the whole thing from a front-row seat, extremely wide-eyed, only 20% of my body angry with envy.
FRIDAY
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
–from Ilya Kaminsky's We Lived Happily During the War
xo,
M
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